California Spent $17 Billion on Homelessness. It’s Not Working.

The Wood Street encampment for years drew people with nowhere to live, until a fire made finding a solution an urgent—and frustrating—task

By Christine Mai-Duc and Jim Carlton of The WSJ.  

The article mentions that California has 115,000 unsheltered homeless people and it spent $17 billion combating homelessness in the past four fiscal years. That is $147,000 per unsheltered homeless person or about $37,000 per year. I don't know how many other homeless people there are but apparently they are not all unsheltered. What the cost per person for all of them is not clear but $37,000 per year does seem high.

Excerpts:

"The number of homeless people in California grew about 50% between 2014 and 2022. The state, which accounts for 12% of the U.S. population, has about half of the nation’s unsheltered homeless, an estimated 115,000 people, according to federal and state data last year. It also has among the highest average rent and median home prices in the U.S."

"California spent a record $17 billion combating homelessness in the past four fiscal years. For the state budget year starting in July, Gov. Gavin Newsom has proposed another $3.7 billion. 

Voters in Los Angeles and San Francisco, which have some of the largest homeless populations in California, were unhappy enough about it to approve taxes costing them billions of dollars to fund anti-homelessness programs and housing in recent years. So far, cost overruns and delays have left little to show for the money.

State and local officials have bickered over responsibility. Mr. Newsom late last year threatened to withhold funding from local governments that he believed weren’t attacking the problem aggressively enough. That included programs to move squatters, willingly or not.

Local leaders said the Newsom administration hasn’t provided enough stable funding for programs to treat and house the homeless."

"authorities are stuck in a cycle of clearing out encampments and scattering people who find another spot to gather."